Guy Gavriel Kay

Guy Gavriel Kay (born November 7, 1954) is a Canadian writer of fantasy fiction.

Quotes[edit]

All page numbers are from the mass market paperback edition published by Roc ISBN 0-451-45115-5

When power is gone the memory of power lingers.
- Part 1 “A Blade in the Soul”, Chapter 1 (p. 9)

I suppose being right will have to compensate me for being poor—the story of my life, I fear.
- Chapter 1 (p. 14)

Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind.
- Chapter 4 (p. 77)

A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once...We can never truly know the path we have not walked.
- Chapter 4 (p. 79)

“The Tyrants have cleaned out most of the highway brigands. Just a matter of protecting their own interests. They want to make sure no one else robs us before they do with their border tariffs and taxes.” He spat, discreetly, into the dust of the road. “Personally I preferred the brigands. There were ways of dealing with them.”
- Part 2 “Dianora”, Chapter 7 (p. 184)

Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea.
- Chapter 8 (p. 225)

There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.
- Part 3 “Ember to Ember”, Chapter 10 (p. 317)

He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.
- Part 4 “The Price of Blood”, Chapter 14 (p. 443)

Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm.
- Chapter 15 (p. 461)

It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth.
- Part 5, “The Memory of a Flame”, Chapter 17 (p. 541)

Words were power, words tried to change you, to shape bridges of longing that no one could ever really cross.
- Chapter 17 (p. 561)

In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.
- Chapter 19 (p. 613)

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Guy Gavriel Kay